


Sovegna Vos

by goldfinch



Category: Luther (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gardens & Gardening, Grief/Mourning, Mentions of Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 04:38:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3106184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfinch/pseuds/goldfinch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He’s a grown man,” Mark tells her.</p><p>“Yes, but unfortunately that doesn’t preclude the possibility of him doing something silly. Rather increases it, in fact.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sovegna Vos

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Dante's _Purgatorio_ by way of _The Wasteland_. In full: 'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor,' meaning, 'be mindful in due time of my pain.'

Mark reads. He goes to the cinema alone. He tends his plants under the sunroof, behind a door with peeling paint; he trains vines up the walls, across the ceiling until the light goes green and he feels like he’s in another country. He misses Zoe.

“I’m going back to work,” John tells him, over their seventh weekly game of chess. (John always wins, but sometimes Mark gives him a run for his money.) The coffee at this cafe is only decent, but it’s probably better than at the station. It’s also within walking distance of Mark’s flat, safely within what’s become, over the last few weeks, a greatly reduced sphere of influence.

Mark sips his coffee, considering the board. “Really?”

“Yep.” John moves his bishop; check. “I think it’s time.”

“I’m glad.”

“Save me sitting around all day doing nothing. Zoe said I’d -” but he cuts himself off, and Mark knows the look on his face because he’s seen it in the mirror, forcing hurt like moving too fast after a wound. John’s limp is gone but the inside of his head is probably as foggy and desolate as Mark’s own. 

Whenever he closes his eyes he sees the shape of Zoe’s body under a sheet.

“I don’t know that seeing him die made anything better,” he says.

“No. No, me neither.” I told you, Luther’s look says. I told you you shouldn’t have killed him. And Alice Morgan may have pulled the trigger but Mark put the gun in her hand; Mark’s the one who told her to do it. Still.

“I don’t regret it.”

“That’s good,” John says, and it’s so firm and solid that Mark knows he believes it, even if he doesn’t know why.

 

 

 

 

He’s thinking about getting a cat. Something to wind through the trailing plants and sit on his lap when he reads. Something quiet, to suit this new life of his. Books and green light on the backs of his hands and no one to talk to. He spends his days mapping himself, the cracks and fissures of his soul, deciding if he can be pasted back together. It surprises him to realize he believes he can be. One afternoon he comes home from the supermarket - pasta, chicken, cheese and tomatoes, bachelor food again, things that don’t take too long to cook - to find Alice Morgan curled up in his chair.

“Mark North,” she says, as he lays his bags on the floor. Then, rethinking, he picks them up again and brings them into the kitchen. “Remember me?”

“Yes.” Pasta in the cupboard; tomatoes on the counter; chicken and cheese in the fridge.

“Yes, he says. Not ‘of course’? Tsk. We killed a man together, you and I. A friendship forged in fire.”

She’s supposed to be in prison, last he heard. Or a hospital? Something. He only ever hears about her through John, and then only when he asks; despite how easily she seems to step in and out of his life John keeps her like a secret, close to the vest. Mark shuts the cupboard. “Can I help you with something?”

“I’m so glad you asked. I’m worried, you see. About John.”

“And what do you expect me to do about it?”

“Well, I know about your little meetings. Your coffee, your games of chess. You’re close.”

“Close is rather overstating it, I think -“

“No - no I don’t think it is. John has professed me to be incapable of authentic feeling but I know that he cares what happens to you, and I assume you care what happens to him - am. I. Wrong?” She spits out the last few words. He’s never seen her angry - never seen her anything but glacially calm, slow-smiled and dangerous - but he thinks this might be it, here, now. 

Zoe would have been able to talk to this woman without being afraid. Had done it, in fact. He remembers. And then she’d curled herself into him, all the steel and softness and warmth of her. Zoe. She’d chosen him but she’d loved Luther, too.

“No,” Mark says, and his voice is steady. “You’re right.”

Alice's face clears abruptly, and then she smiles. “Of course. If you’d keep an eye on him, if you' be… well. A friend. I'd appreciate it.” She drops a hand to the counter, opens his empty biscuit jar and then closes it again. “I’m going out of the country, you see, but if I leave him on his own he’s liable to do something he’ll regret. Or that I’ll regret.”

“He’s a grown man.”

“Yes. Unfortunately that doesn’t preclude the possibility of him doing something silly. Rather increases it, in fact.”

“I - yeah. Okay.” Mark wipes a hand over his face. “So I - what, take him out for coffee, let him keep beating me at chess?”

“If you like.” Her lips curve up into something soft and sharp at once, silver under velvet, as deep and dark as space. “You could also try winning.”

 

 

 

 

So he and John keep meeting for coffee, for chess, for the occasional cake, which Mark’s discovered is actually quite good. Better than the coffee. As the month drags on he’s fairly certain John’s only still agreeing to come because he thinks Mark needs these meetings, somehow, but he has his books. He has his plants. Even the orchid he keeps in the atrium is doing well, which is a bit of a miracle, since he forgets about it for days at a time.

John doesn’t do anything silly, unless you count handcuffing a teenage girl to the wicker chair in Mark’s atrium. 

Jenny, it turns out, does death pornos. Mark doesn’t ask, but she tells him, the way she’s told him everything so far: bitterly, jerking at the handcuffs.

“They gas me before, so it’s like I’m actually dead? They said they used to do it with girls who were just pretending to be dead, but you could tell - they’d stiffen up when they weren’t supposed to, make noise and stuff. Now that they have the money they use chloroform or whatever. I don’t actually remember any of it because I’m unconscious, obviously, but one time I watched one of the videos after. Online, I mean. It was like it was someone else.” Her voice has gone soft and hurt-sounding, and christ, she really is just a teenager. She looks one even in that silly outfit, in corpse-pale skin. “Some other girl in that video, getting - yeah. I only watched the one, though. Couldn’t even get through the whole thing. Isn’t that funny?”

“Would you like some tea?” Mark asks eventually. “Or orange juice?”

“Got anything stronger?”

“Afraid not.” In fact he does, a bottle of whisky in the cabinet over the stove, but he hasn’t touched it in months and he doesn’t intend to start now. He can see this girl’s edges, broken and bloodied, a ragged-toothed raccoon backed into a corner, and John her only way out. Maybe that’s the appeal. John can’t leave her when he’s all she’s got left. Which he must be, if she ended up here.

“Tea’s fine, then,” she says, looks away.

 

 

 

 

After he drops her off with John later that day, he doesn’t see her for ages. Months. John is accused of murder (again), and Mark stays carefully abreast of the news but doesn’t call John’s mobile, though he wants to. Sometimes he feels as though John is his responsibility, Mark twice tasked to look out for him, to excuse him, to make sure he doesn’t do anything silly, whatever that means. Except, he knows. Has himself considered laying a razor blade against his wrists, but only once or twice, and never for long. Not for ages.

But John’s an adult. And he’s out of police custody within hours, and then - who knows? They arrest a man named Tom Marwood; Luther disappears. Mark doesn’t call him. Luther doesn’t call either.

Then one day he opens his door to see Jenny standing there, rubbing at her knuckles like it hurt them to knock.

“Jenny. Hello. How can I help you?” Surprise always makes him overly polite; it’s his default. Nothing to be done about it.

She stands there for a moment, blinking at him. Then, “So I was wondering if I could stay here for a day or two? My flatmate’s being a bitch and I just - I needed someplace to go.”

“What about John?”

She shrugs, one-shouldered, and in that gesture is all the fear and abandonment comes roaring back into her, her stiff shoulders, her forced-still hands. For all that she used to work in front of a camera she is shockingly out of control of her own body.

“I think he's out of town,” she says. “His phone’s disconnected too, and his car wasn’t at his flat.”

“Come in. I know who we can try.”

He directs her into the atrium, where she takes the chair she hadn’t been cuffed to, and watches him dig his phone out of the papers on the kitchen table. He wrote her number on the back of an envelope instead of in his planner - it had seemed safer that way, somehow.

“Mr. North.” Alice’s voice is as easy and luxurious as a cat’s stretch. He can hear voices in the background but nothing loud, more cafe than city street, more Bath than London.

“Where are you?”

He can hear her smile. “Somewhere _mar_ velous. Would you care to join?”

“I’m just looking for John, actually. Do you know where he is?”

“I do. At this very moment he’s eating a plate of _fugu sashimi_. Pufferfish,” she adds, when he doesn’t respond immediately. “De _li_ cious.”

In the background, the deep hum of John’s voice saying something Mark doesn’t catch. “Could I speak with him, please.”

“Why, whatever’s the matter?”

“A friend of his showed up on my door this morning. Jenny?”

“Mmm. Give her the phone, then.” The background noise drops away as though, somewhere, a door has closed or opened. He’s not sure she even gives John the phone, the way she’d told him, Mark, what to do, but - no. Jenny’s face scrunches up, a teenager’s confused bristling; she sits forward. Defense or attack, Mark doesn’t know, but is there a difference, here?

“Who the fuck are you?” Jenny asks, glaring at the climbing vine. Mark raised that from three feet all the way up to the ceiling. It doesn’t flower, doesn’t smell of anything in particular, but he likes the delicate veins on the underside of every leaf, the white branching life. Zoe liked his plants, his hobby; these days he smiles when he thinks of her. "No, I get that, I only want -" He watches Jenny relax, draw into herself like a porcupine flattening its spines. “Yeah,” she says. “No, I get it.”

After a while she hands the phone back, gives him a half smile. “Thanks.” She’s wearing an absurd purple shade of eyeshadow that sparkles in the light.

“There’s a guest bedroom down the hall, if you like. Sheets are in the cupboard.” He watches her clunk off down the hallway, the sound of her boots echoing a little in the empty space. “The two of you are in Japan, I assume?” he says into the phone.

“Mm,” Alice says. It’s not a proper affirmation but it’s not a denial, either.

“What did you tell her?”

“That John is not in a position to return to England at this particular moment in time. That it would be dangerous for him.”

“Is that true?”

“Oh, in every possible way.”

On the train platform that day, the day Mark screamed ‘kill him’ and Alice did, she’d been as calm and collected as if they’d been at a dinner party instead of a murder scene. He doesn’t know what she means, doesn’t know if John is still being hunted by London’s finest or if she means a more immediate danger, a heart attack or breakdown or a knife in his back. It’s Alice: she could mean anything. Mark’s never been able to read her, but John can, and they’re somewhere in Japan eating poisonous fish together, and John is probably happy, which is what he deserves. Mark used to dislike him, used to be a little afraid of him - now he just wants him to be as whole as Mark has made himself.

“Does this mean I’m off the hook, then?” Mark asks.

“I beg your pardon?”

“About keeping an eye on John.”

“Oh, I believe I have things _well_ in hand,” she purrs, and he can hear the smile in her voice, slow and dark and smooth. “Thank you, Mark. I wish you all the best. But, please, don’t call this number again.”

Somewhere between the moment when she hangs up and when he lays his mobile down on the table, Mark realizes he’s smiling. He brushes a hand against the trailing vine as he goes to show Jenny where the towels are, the soap, how to work the shower. Where to put her socks. She looks up when he comes in.

"Guess I'm on my own, huh."

"Well. Not entirely." She looks better though, Mark thinks. Older, more solid. Her eyelids glitter like twinned butterflies when she blinks. She won't stay long, but he wouldn't mind it if she did. "Come on," he says, turning. "I'll show you where everything is."


End file.
